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Want to know how to be a genius? There are five things you
can learn from looking at those who are the very best.

1) Be curious and driven

For his book Creativity, noted professor Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi did interviews with 91 groundbreaking
individuals across a number of disciplines, including 14 Nobel
Prize winners. In 50 Psychology Classics Tom
Butler-Bowdon summed up many of Csikszentmihalyi’s
findings including this one:

Successful creative people tend to have two things in
abundance, curiosity and drive. They are absolutely
fascinated by their subject, and while others may be more
brilliant, their sheer desire for accomplishment is the decisive
factor.

2) It’s not about formal education. It’s about hours at
your craft.

Do you need a sky-high IQ? Do great geniuses all have PhD’s?
Nope. Most had about a college-dropout level of education.

Dean Keith Simonton, a professor at the University of
California at Davis, conducted a large-scale study of more than
three hundred creative high achievers born between 1450 and
1850—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, Rembrandt, for
example. He determined the amount of formal education each had
received and measured each one’s level of eminence by the spaces
devoted to them in an array of reference works. He found that the
relation between education and eminence, when plotted on a graph,
looked like an inverted U: The most eminent creators were those
who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about
the middle of college. Less education than that—or
more—corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity.

If we’re looking for evidence that too much knowledge of
the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance
in creative achievement, we have not found it in the
research.

Instead, all evidence seems to point in the opposite
direction. The most eminent creators are consistently those who
have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have
devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it,
and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.

3) Test Your Ideas

Howard Gardner studied geniuses like Picasso, Freud and
Stravinsky and found a similar pattern of analyzing, testing and
feedback used by all of them:

In a study of thirty-five artists, Getzels and
Csikszentmihalyi found that the most creative in their sample
were more open to experimentation and to reformulating their
ideas for projects than their less creative
counterparts.

4) You Must Sacrifice

10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of hours. It means many other
things (some important) will need to be ignored.

In fact, geniuses are notably less likely to be popular in high
school. Why?

The deliberatepractice that will one day make them
famous alienates them from their peers in adolescence.

…the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong
passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995
studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in
the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his
subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly
because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their
peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often
fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or
studying math requires a solitude they dread.”

At the extremes, the amount of practice and devotion required can
pass into the realm of the pathological. If hours alone
determine genius then it is inevitable that reaching the greatest
heights will require, quite literally, obsession.

My study reveals that, in one way or another, each of the
creators became embedded in some kind of a bargain, deal, or
Faustian arrangement, executed as a means of ensuring the
preservation of his or her unusual gifts. In general, the
creators were so caught up in the pursuit of their work mission
that they sacrificed all, especially the possibility of a rounded
personal existence. The nature of this arrangement
differs: In some cases (Freud, Eliot, Gandhi), it involves the
decision to undertake an ascetic existence; in some cases, it
involves a self-imposed isolation from other individuals
(Einstein, Graham); in Picasso’s case, as a consequence of a
bargain that was rejected, it involves an outrageous exploitation
of other individuals; and in the case of Stravinsky, it involves
a constant combative relationship with others, even at the cost
of fairness. What pervades these unusual arrangements is
the conviction that unless this bargain has been compulsively
adhered to, the talent may be compromised or even irretrievably
lost. And, indeed, at times when the bargain is relaxed, there
may well be negative consequences for the individual’s creative
output.

5) Work because of passion, not money

Passion produces better art than desire for financial gain — and
that leads to more success in the long run.

“Those artists who pursued their painting and
sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for
extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially
recognized as superior,” the study said. “It is those who are
least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually
receive them.”